


Keith the Amnesiac

by jilliancares



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Galra Keith (Voltron), Like, M/M, Memory Loss, amnesiac keith out himself and doesn't realize that this is going to have Consequences, he likes to cuddle, how about:, i can make up whatever i want okay, keith has amnesia, klance, like just some instinct stuff, shut up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-13 23:09:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11770383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jilliancares/pseuds/jilliancares
Summary: In which an accident leaves Keith temporarily without his Voltron-filled memories and he may or may not spill a few of his better kept secrets to Lance.





	Keith the Amnesiac

**Author's Note:**

  * For [melancholymango](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melancholymango/gifts).



> hi guys i hope you like this!! this was just really self indulgent three days ago i was like hey,,, i want to write keith with amnesia,,, and now here we are. enjoy!!
> 
> (gifted to melancholymango aka kali simply because i love her)

It didn’t make sense for Keith to hold his breath.

It was a dumb, childish reflex, one that whispered  _they won’t see you if you hold your breath._  And that made sense to him for some reason, even though logically, he knew much better than that. Holding his breath wouldn’t make him invisible to the Galra fleet, much less his entire lion. But still, as alarms blared around him, as lights flashed, as Red growled a sort of warning in his head, he held his breath.

“Keith!” Lance’s voice cried out over the intercom. But it was too late—Red was going down, spiraling towards the planet’s surface, and no amount of tugging on the levers or stomping on the pedals would change that. Keith gasped in much needed air, watching with wide eyes as the surface grew closer and closer and closer.

His hands were sweaty on the levers, still pulling on them fruitlessly. Red, inexplicably, was purring, probably trying to calm him down or something. It didn’t work. Keith clenched his eyes shut.

—

_Knock. Knock. Knock._

The sound was amplified, the knocking echoing loudly all around him. His eyes flew open as he gasped, struggling against what must’ve been invisible bonds—he felt like he couldn’t move, all of his limbs heavy. But then the blue-tinted glass around him slid open, and the feeling rushed back into his arms and legs all at once. He stumbled from the strange, person-shaped chamber, directly into another person.

“Keith! Man am I glad to see you,” said a man before him. He was much taller than Keith, and wider too, a kind smile plastered on his face. “Shiro was starting to get worried, you’ve been in there for almost three days now.”

Keith swallowed thickly. He couldn’t seem to make words come out of his mouth. His head was reeling—throbbing, really. He could hardly wrap his head around what he was hearing. He’d been in that… that glass thing for three days? Why? And who was Shiro?

“Keith? You okay?”

His stomach was twisted into unsteady knots, and Keith pushed himself away from the man, taking careful steps back. “Who are you?” he said finally. “Where… where am I?”

“What?” the man exclaimed, looking at Keith incredulously. And, okay, maybe he wasn’t a  _man_. He seemed about Keith’s age, which was… Er, how old was he again? Wracking his brain, Keith tried to remember the last birthday he’d had. Had it been his fifteenth? That didn’t seem quite right, but then again, neither did the fact that Keith was in some foreign-looking, high-tech seeming room. If it could even be called a room—it was  _huge_.

From what he could remember, he should be back at his house right now with his dad. He was supposed to be going to the Garrison soon, he’d finally got accepted, after months of anxious waiting, resulting in ragged fingernails and bitten lips.

“Who are you?” Keith repeated, more seriously now. Had he been kidnapped? But if he had, when? He couldn’t remember the last thing he’d been doing. It was all a blur, and when he thought really hard, it just made his head ache. “Where have you taken me? Where’s my dad?”

“Keith, it’s  _me_. Hunk! Left leg of Voltron—you can’t seriously be forgetting me, can you?”

“Voltron?” Keith muttered, before deciding that he didn’t care about these foreign words. He had to get out of here, had to get back home. “Listen—I don’t know who you are. My dad—we don’t have a lot of money, but… he could scrounge up something to pay your ransom.”

“Ransom? What are you saying?” Hunk muttered. After carefully evaluating the man before him, Keith decided that he could outrun him. And so he ran, sprinting past him and along the echoing, metal floors, towards the double doors at the other end of the large room.

“Keith!” Hunk called after him, which Keith ignored. He skidded into the hallway, gasping more in fear than fatigue. The hallway branched off in either direction, and Keith chose randomly, darting to the left, and then the right, and then the left again. He had no idea where he was going, what he was doing, but pure panic was driving him.

“Keith,” a voice said from the ceiling, some sort of speaker system. “Coran speaking—I’d like to remind you that it’s never a good idea to train after exiting the healing pods! You can run laps later.”

Realizing that, somehow, some man was watching him, Keith stopped running, shrinking against the wall beside him. He didn’t even see any cameras, had no idea how anyone could be watching him…

“Wow!” said the same voice—Coran, apparently. “I didn’t actually expect that to work! Score one for Coran!”

Keith’s hands were shaking. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was  _scared_. He had no idea what was going on, where he was, or who these people were. Keith inched along the wall behind him, grabbing onto the handle of the nearest door and whipping it open, slamming it back closed behind him. He pressed himself against the door, listening with all his might.

“Whatchya doin’?”

“Aagh!” Keith screamed, spinning around to face a girl sitting on a bed. She wore round glasses and a green shirt, her hair chopped inexpertly around her head and one of her eyebrows raised.

“Something wrong?”

“Yes!” Keith exclaimed, fed up. “I don’t know who any of you people are!”

“Oh no,” the girl said immediately. “You don’t have amnesia, do you?”

“What?” Keith barked. “No! Of course not!” Except, well…  _could_  he? He couldn’t really remember what the last thing he’d been doing was. And he didn’t know where he was, or who these people were, but they all seemed to know him. “I would know if I had amnesia!”

“Really? You think you would know if you’d forgotten things?”

This made Keith draw up blank. How could someone know if they’d forgotten something?

“That’s what I thought. Come on.” The girl stood up and strode past Keith, shoving the door open and walking confidently down the hall. It was evident that she knew her way around this place well, and belatedly, Keith wondered if… if he was supposed to, too.

“You’re really smart, aren’t you?” Keith commented, following along a bit slower behind her. He couldn’t help it, he was trying to take everything in. The tall, tall ceilings, the white metal surrounding them, the endless amount of doors—seriously, were they in a fucking castle or something?

The girl smiled really big when he said this, looking over her shoulder and seeming to stand a little bit taller, not that this really did anything for her. “Glad you noticed!” Keith just nodded, surprised by her enthusiasm.

They ended up in what looked like a giant control room, and beyond that, beyond its glass walls—space. Keith made a choked, surprised sort of noise.

“We’re in  _space_?” he gasped, staring at the endless starry sky surrounding them. He didn’t even manage to take in the two other people present in the room, too busy staring past them with wide, panicked eyes. Not only was he not in Texas, not anywhere near his dad, he wasn’t even on  _Earth_! What had he been doing in the amount of time since he’d very apparently lost his memory?

“Where else would we be?”

Keith looked up. It was evident who’d spoken—she had dark skin and white hair and… and, well, she wasn’t exactly human, was she? There were pink markings on her cheeks, and her ears looked like elf ears. Maybe this was all some crazy, elaborate dream Keith had managed to cook up, even though he usually didn’t dream.

“Uh—Earth?”

“You can’t go back to Earth!” a middle aged man exclaimed, the same voice from the ceiling—Coran. He pointed his finger at Keith exuberantly, his other hand coming up to twirl his mustache. “Not until Zarkon is defeated, that is.”

“Keith has amnesia,” the short girl explained, and both the almost-but-not-quite-humans looked at her in confusion.

“Am-what-a?” the girl asked.

“You guys don’t have amnesia on Altea?”

“What  _is_  amnesia?”

“It usually happens after a particularly bad head injury,” the short girl explained. “There’s different kinds—it looks like Keith has the retroactive kind, meaning he’s forgotten part of his past. He probably lost one or two years, seeing as he isn’t acting like a ten year old or something.”

“That’s stupid,” Coran commented. “Just remember it.”

“What?” Keith said, incredulous.

“It doesn’t work like that,” said the same girl. “He can’t remember it right now, it’s out of his control.”

“Alteans can do whatever we want with our brains!” Coran stated proudly. “Still, piloting Voltron won’t be easy if Keith can’t remember how to do it.”

“I’m sure he can learn again,” said the other Altean. “I think the real problem will be getting his memories back—no one would like forgetting part of their past. He  _can_  get them back, right Pidge?”

“Er—probably,” Pidge decided. “A lot of the time they just come back by themselves. Sometimes they don’t come back at all.”

“Don’t come back?” Keith choked. “But—”

“I said sometimes,” Pidge interrupted. “Plus, have you forgotten who you’re dealing with? I can probably make something to enhance your rate of remembrance…” she started muttering under her breath, one of her hands coming up to clutch her glasses.

“He  _has_  forgotten who he’s dealing with,” Coran pointed out, and Pidge glanced up at him and huffed.

“Whatever. I’m gonna go to the lab.” And with that, she was gone, spinning around and leaving the same way they’d come.

“Hello new Keith!” Coran burst out. “I’m Coran, and this is my niece, Princess Allura.”

“You’re a princess?” Keith managed, and she nodded.

“Our home planet was destroyed by Zarkon ten thousand years ago, but now you and the other paladins are fighting against him.”

“Right,” Keith said. There was no point trying to process the shit she’d just said. Not the fact that she was, apparently, ten thousand years old, nor the fact that he and some other pala-somethings were fighting against whatever had destroyed her entire planet. As if Keith could be doing  _that_.

Suddenly, the doors to the control room slid back open and two people came sprinting in, a third walking behind them. One was the same man from earlier, Hunk.

“Keith has amnesia?!” said the new person beside Hunk. He looked entirely too excited by this. He pointed at Keith. “I assume I don’t need to remind you that you love cleaning and have decided to take on all of my chores?”

“Lance!” Allura reprimanded, and Lance shrugged.

“It was worth a shot.”

“I hate cleaning,” Keith protested.

“Lance, stop trying to trick Keith,” said the man standing behind Lance. He had a shock of white hair at the front of his scalp and a scar over the bridge of his nose. Did Keith have any injuries like that?! What exactly was he participating in fighting against? “You don’t remember me either?”

“Er, no. Sorry.”

“It’s nothing to apologize for,” the man said firmly. “I’m Shiro.”

“I still think that this could be used to our advantage,” Lance said seriously. “Imagine how great he would be at spy missions! Even if he got caught he couldn’t spill all our secrets!”

“We’re not sending him on a mission!” Allura exclaimed. “He has no training—not anymore, anyway.”

Keith’s head was starting to ache something fierce. It was dull and insistent behind his eyes. “What happened to me, anyway?” he asked. “How’d I lose my memory?”

For a few moments, the room was silent. Coran whistled.

“You crashed,” Shiro finally supplied.

“It was  _bad_ ,” Hunk said lowly. “Like, more bad than usual.”

“Scary,” Lace muttered. He was staring straight at Keith, but his eyes were glazed over, as if he were seeing something different.

“But you’re okay!” Hunk said hastily. “And that’s all that matters.”

“I think my memories matter,” Keith argued, and Hunk looked guilty.

“Well, yeah. That too.”

It took a while for all of them to explain exactly what he’d been up to recently. Lance told him gleefully that he’d been kicked out of the Garrison (which—spoiler. Keith hadn’t even  _gone_  yet, that he could remember, anyway). It took longer than it probably should have, everyone interrupting each other to add seemingly important details of their own. But in the end, Keith could gather that he was a paladin of Voltron, meaning he flew a giant robotic magical lion that could combine with everyone else’s lions to form a giant-er robot man.

By the end of it all Keith felt like his headache might split his head in two.

“Do I have a room?” he asked. “I kind of want to lay down. My head hurts.”

“It’s right across from mine!” Lance proclaimed, before spinning and walking out of the room, as if this statement had actually been an invitation for him to bring him there. Keith didn’t care, he followed Lance out of the room and through the halls. For a little while, they were silent.

“You know, real Keith and I hate each other,” Lance said suddenly.

“Really?” Keith said incredulously. Only because, well—he couldn’t see why he would hate Lance. Have a crush on him, maybe, but hate? It was just that Lance was attractive in a very obvious way, his smile blinding, his attitude uplifting—even if he had tried to convince Keith he liked doing chores. And sure, Keith could be sullen and snappy, but that didn’t mean he didn’t enjoy the company of someone like Lance.

“Frenemies, I guess,” Lance amended. “If we’re not throwing punches we’re coming up with kick ass plans together. Or we’re shutting each other’s ideas down until one of us finally has a good one. Or we’re competing.”

Keith didn’t answer. It was just all so strange, knowing he had memories trapped inside him that he couldn’t recall.

“Shiro has amnesia too,” Lance said.

“Really?”

“Well, kind of. His is more because he’s repressed it, though. He was captured by the Galra for like, a year before we all became Voltron. And he remembers things sometimes, but it makes him freeze up. Pidge says it’s PTSD.”

“That’s scary,” Keith admitted. “I can’t believe I’m fighting those guys.”

“You’re not alone,” Lance said suddenly, looking serious. “We’re all together out there—and we really don’t get hurt too often. This—” he gestured to Keith, “—is definitely the worst thing that’s happened so far.”

“Do you think we’re gonna win?” Keith asked. “You know, against the Galra?”

Lance looked surprised by this. “Of course we are!”

“But are you just saying that? ‘Cause I mean, you’re biased.”

“We  _are_  gonna win,” Lance insisted. “Because if we don’t…” he swallowed. “If we don’t, no one can win.”

On that happy note, Lance leaned against the wall beside a door. “Next stop—Keith land,” he said. Then nodded. “This is your room.”

“Right,” Keith muttered, and reached for the door handle.

“They’re automatic,” Lance said, grabbing his wrist to stop him. Keith felt redness climbing into his cheeks. Lance’s fingers were warm. “The door handle’s are just for if the power goes out or something. Watch.” Lance stepped in front of Keith’s door, and it slid open, revealing the room beyond. It was pretty bare, save for a red jacket hanging on a hook by the door. On closer inspection, he spotted a sheathed knife on the bedside table, and a glowing green rock beside it.

“Homey,” Keith muttered, sarcastic.

“It might not look it,” Lance said, “but this really is our home. All of us—we’re a family.”

Keith stepped further into the room and Lance followed him, uninvited.

“My dad’s knife,” Keith commented, scooping it off the bedside table. “I brought this with me?”

“Your mom’s knife, actually,” Lance shrugged. But Keith’s heart was pounding in his chest, so hard it almost hurt.

“My mom?” he muttered. “We know who my mom is? Wh-where is she? Is she alive? Is she nice?”

Lance’s mouth had dropped open. It was obvious that his comment had been an offhand one, something that was considered general knowledge aboard this castle-ship.

“We don’t  _know_  her,” he managed, looking uncomfortable. Keith felt his face fall, disappointment washing through him. “I don’t know if I’m the right person to tell you…”

“Tell me,” Keith insisted. “It’s not fair that you know more about me than I do. Is she dead?”

“We don’t know that either,” Lance muttered. “It’s just—we only know—well, we just know that she’s… Galra.”

Keith sucked in a shocked breath. “What?”

“And so are you, kind of. Partially.”

“I’m  _what_?”

“It’s not so bad!” Lance insisted. “Like, okay, sometimes you get angry and go a little Galra on us, and sometimes you get like, scary Galra teeth and shit—”

“ _What_?”

“But it’s not a big deal!”

“You’re telling me I’m part alien-animal  _thing_  and that’s it’s not a big deal?!” Keith exclaimed. “That is a big deal!”

“They’re more human-like than animal,” Lance protested. “I mean, they speak English—which is kind of weird when you think about it, that all these aliens we’ve been meeting just conveniently speak our language. I mean, I’d know what they were saying if they spoke Spanish, you know? But it’s always English, never even some alien language, and—”

“Sorry, don’t care,” Keith interrupted. “I’m an ALIEN!”

“ _Part_  alien,” Lance corrected. “And it seriously doesn’t matter. You’re still Keith.”

“I need to go to sleep,” Keith muttered. He felt kind of… dead, almost. He just needed to lay down and forget about everything for a little while. Maybe by the time he woke up his memories would be back and he wouldn’t feel like the world was spinning too fast on its axis—not that he was even on a planet anymore, he reminded himself for what felt like the millionth time. Maybe he’d wake up and laugh at how weird it had felt to forget so much. Maybe he’d argue with Lance, like he was apparently supposed to do.

“Alright,” Lance said. He was backing towards the door. “Just—stop freaking out. I know freaking out’s kind of like, your specialty, but just try to calm down. You’d basically already figured out you were Galra by the time someone told you.”

Keith didn’t answer. He’d already climbed into his bed, fully clothed, and pulled the covers over his head.

—

It wasn’t immediately apparent what had woken him. Nonetheless, Keith found himself sitting upright in bed, feeling completely and utterly awake. For a moment he had that panic of  _where am I?_ , like when you fell asleep in a hotel and woke up in the dark room, briefly forgetting where you’d been. Except this time it was times a thousand, because Keith knew after a moment where he’d fallen asleep, but it was still strange, still different. Still didn’t feel like his life.

Keith gasped as suddenly, a sort of rumble echoed around his mind. It was like he was here, sitting in bed, but also somewhere else—somewhere on the castle-ship. With his eyes closed he knew exactly where to go, like he was following a familiar, well-worn path, one he’d traveled many times. Before he knew it, he was out of bed and out of his room, still barefoot, and running down the halls.

It was night time now, Keith was pretty sure. Although, being out in the middle of space, it was kind of night time everywhere. Except now the castle’s interior was dark, the lights much dimmer than before, not to mention the fact that no one was out and about.

He soon found himself at a door, behind which was a sort of zip-line. Shrugging and figuring he must’ve done it hundreds of times before, Keith grabbed on and let himself swing down the red-lit path. At the end of it was a car-like hovercraft, and at the end of  _that_  passageway…

“Holy shit,” he breathed. There was a giant, robotic red lion standing on the platform before him, and Keith climbed out of the car-thing to stare up at it in amazement. Sure, he’d listened as the people who were apparently his new family had explained about Voltron, about the lions, about how he was the red paladin, but it hadn’t really  _sunk in_. Now though, standing before the red lion, he felt breathless. He felt like maybe… maybe it was a good thing that he was here, defending the universe with the other paladins.

A deep, prominent rumble seemed to echo in Keith’s chest, and he was sure it was coming from the lion itself. He stumbled forward, toward the lion, wondering how he was supposed to get in. He gasped, jumping backward when the lion  _moved_. It roared, lowering its giant head and opening its mouth.

“You want to eat me,” Keith muttered, staring at the gaping entrance. “Sure. Right. Obviously.” He walked forward, and the moment he was inside the mouth, it closed behind him. He tumbled forward as the lion moved, sitting back upright, and landed in the pilot’s chair.

“Woah,” he breathed. And then he felt it inside him. It was hard to describe, like trying to explain the need to sleep at night or the ingrained knowledge that food needed to be chewed before it could be swallowed. But he felt the  _presence_  of the lion, in and around him, like he’d just stepped into his warm house after walking through the snow.

“Red,” he said, with sudden, vicious knowledge. He couldn’t remember his team members, couldn’t remember Lance who he argued with or Allura who was an alien, but he could  _remember_  Red. He felt like he was home—for the first time since stepping out of that pod, he felt like he was someplace familiar.

The second he felt this, Red let out a proud, rumbling purr, the vibrations rolling through Keith’s body comfortingly. Finally feeling safe and sound, more so than he had earlier, he let himself close his eyes again, curling up on his chair. Red continued to purr the entire time he was drifting off to sleep.

—

Keith woke, annoyingly, to blaring alarms.

“Attention paladins!” Coran cried over the intercom. Keith sat up abruptly, his mouth tasting like sleep and his eyes blurry, his hair matted on one side. Were they being attacked? Was he going to have to try to form Voltron with these people? Would it be instinctual, his body remembering what his mind couldn’t, or would he simply be lost and confused, becoming a liability and putting the rest of the team in danger?

“Keith is  _missing_!”

Keith groaned in annoyance, slumping in his seat. Red seemed amused at his annoyance.

“You don’t get what it’s like,” Keith mumbled to her. “All these people are so… loud. And busy. And don’t seem to want to leave me alone.”

Letting out an amused snort, Red abruptly started moving, and Keith found himself, moments later, ejected onto the floor.

“So much for our bond!” he cried. Red flashed her yellow eyes at him before going still.

Pulling himself sleepily to his feet, Keith backtracked through the castle, back towards the control room. Alarms were still blaring, loud and annoying.

“Keith!” cried Lance over the announcement system, and Keith winced at the shrillness of his voice. “In case you forgot who you are again, I’m Lance, and you owe me a month’s worth of chores!” There was a pause, and then— “Ow!”

“You’re scaring him!” cried a Hunk-sounding person.

“He’s not scared,” Pidge said somewhere in the background. “He’s probably just lost, he doesn’t remember his way around anymore.”

Keith emerged in the control room. Across the room from him, the entire team was crowded around a small speaker system. Suddenly, Hunk dived forward.

“Please come back Keith!” he sobbed. “Don’t be scared!”

“I’m not scared,” Keith finally spoke up, and various cries of surprise greeted him as everyone spun around to look at him.

“Keith!” most of them cheered, but he thought he maybe might’ve heard someone say “mullet!” which he didn’t even have. His hair was just a little shaggy!

Apparently the team had been forced into a full blown panic when Lance had gone to retrieve him from his room that morning only to find that he was missing. Lance had run around the castle, collecting everyone and spreading the panic from person to person. By the end of it they’d been checking in rooms and under tables and even in cabinets for him (“You never know,” Lance had said).

For some reason the announcement system hadn’t been their first thought, and by the time they remembered it—and the alarms—half the team was convinced Keith was dead. Shiro seemed to be the only reasonable person, apparently sure the whole time that Keith had just snuck off somewhere to be alone, to be more comfortable.

“You do things like that a lot,” Shiro had informed Keith, as if it was something that Keith didn’t already know. But then he realized that everyone didn’t exactly know how much he knew about himself, and Shiro was just being kind, anyway. Apparently he and Keith had been close ever since a little bit before he’d joined the Garrison.

It was sad that he couldn’t remember it, but he’d apparently gotten a scholarship to the school, and he’d earned the right to train a bit with a graduated senior—Shiro. In the end, they’d become closer friends than they probably should have, and the training had managed to become a minimum, not that they’d let the school know that.

“Sorry,” Keith apologized, after everyone had calmed down after the relief of finding him alive and well. “I just—I woke up in the middle of the night. I think my lion was calling me.”

Surprisingly, this received only understanding nods. And just as soon as it’d began, the freakout was over, and everyone was expressing how hungry they were, leading the way to the kitchen as if this was just another normal morning. And maybe it was—it wasn’t like Keith actually knew.

—

“Oh,” Lance said, when the door slid open to reveal Keith. It’d been a few days since he’d woken up memory-less, and the whole team had fallen into a sort of routine. Drill Keith over breakfast to see if his memory had returned, explain things that he didn’t understand, including inside jokes that just seemed stupid, and spend the rest of the day doing random, usually separate activities—whenever Keith decided to join someone they acted like it was weird, so he assumed that he didn’t normally hang out with them like that anyway.

But he couldn’t help that he’d turned up at Lance’s door: he’d been craving attention for the past few hours and Lance was so close to his bedroom anyway. “Keith. What’s up?”

Sure, he liked to be alone sometimes, even craved it, but not  _all_  the time. He was used to living with his dad, used to spending evenings on the couch watching TV and talking to him over dinner. The rest of the team acted like it was out of the ordinary for him to even speak up half the time, much less seek out their company. It made him wonder what had happened when he’d stopped living with his dad, how anti-social he must’ve become.

Still, seeking out this attention felt different than normal. It wasn’t as if he was just bored, just wanted to hang out with someone, to talk to someone. He knew what that felt like, had done it all the time back at home. This was more deep, more guttural. Embarrassingly, it made him wonder if it had something to do with the fact that he was part Galra, like Lance had said. Maybe that was why he was even seeking him out in the first place.

“Can I come in?” Keith asked, ignoring the way his own cheeks grew red. It wasn’t like there was anything inherently inappropriate about entering another person’s bedroom.

“Yeah, of course! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Keith said hastily. The doors slid shut automatically behind him, making him jump. “Actually… I feel kind of… weird.”

“Weird how?” Lance said slowly. “Are you remembering things?”

“No,” Keith answered, feeling guilty. He knew how badly Lance wanted him to remember, he just couldn’t help it, couldn’t make it come faster. “I just feel like…” There was no way to explain it without it sounding embarrassing. And now that he was here, in Lance’s room, he felt it even stronger. He just wanted to climb into Lance’s bed and hold him close, maybe fall asleep in his arms. Which was  _strange_ , yeah, Keith knew that but… Well, he couldn’t help it!

Suddenly, Lance’s eyes widened, and he looked very, very invested. Was this something that had happened to Keith before? Did Lance already know about it? This horrible, insistent craving for attention—had he helped Keith sort it out before?

“Er—do you know what I’m talking about? You know what’s wrong with me?”

“We call it your man-period,” Lance said casually, and Keith froze.

“ _What_?”

“Calm down! You don’t actually like— _bleed_ , or something.” Keith felt his shoulders shrink away from his ears, where they had risen in terrified indignation. “It’s just that for about a week every month you become really grumpy. Sometimes you and Pidge become aligned—it’s terrifying.”

“I can’t believe this,” Keith muttered.

“It’s no big deal. Usually you just terrorize us for a week and refuse to be around us as often as possible. Once you locked yourself in your room for three days straight—we had to feed you through the crack under the door.”

“I didn’t want to be around you guys?” Keith said incredulously. “When I’m feeling like  _this_?”

Lance’s eyes twinkled with curiosity. “What’re you feeling like?”

“Like I need to be cuddling with someone ASAP.” Lance’s eyes widened. “Is that not something I would normally tell you?”

“Considering the fact you’ve been locking yourself away and suffering once a week every month? No, don’t think so.”

“Uh oh,” Keith said. “I guess I won’t like that I said that when I get my memory back.”

“But who knows when that’ll happen!” Lance cheered. “You’re safe from your internal rage for who knows how long!” It was crazy how he could just pull the bright side out of anything, but Keith just shrugged. It wasn’t like  _he_  cared whether Lance knew he was craving affection right now. He had no clue why he usually did.

“Does that mean I haven’t told you guys I’m gay either?” Keith pondered aloud. Lance choked. Keith considered that fact that maybe, he’d been keeping these things secret for a reason. Was Team Voltron homophobic?

“Oh my God,” Lance breathed. “I’m gonna have to stop you from ejecting yourself into space,” he said. “Future you, that is. Memory restored you.”

“I really haven’t told you that?” Keith said incredulously. “Why? I thought we were all friends?”

“How would I know!” Lance spluttered. Keith was just confused. He’d always been really open about his sexuality, had he hidden it when he’d gone to the Garrison? And then hidden it from all his friends afterwards?

“Oh well,” Lance said. “You can worry about that later. Come here.”

“What?”

“You said you wanted to cuddle!” Lance said, sounding indignant. “Who comes to another person’s room to tell them they want to cuddle without asking to cuddle?”

Lance had a good point, Keith couldn’t argue that. And he really  _was_  feeling horrible. It was like his entire body was trying to drag him closer to the nearest person, to wrap himself up in their skin. And so he crossed the room, climbing into Lance’s bed without reservations. He figured there was probably some way to ease into it, like sit beside the other boy and ask him to wrap his arm around his shoulder or something, but that’s not what Keith did. He just climbed onto the bed and then onto Lance, straddling him and shoving his head into Lance’s neck.

“Woah,” Lance said, laughing softly. Keith should probably be embarrassed. He was sure when he got his memories back he’d be mortified, but for now all he felt was relieved. This was exactly what he’d needed, after all, and Lance smelled wonderful, like warmth and rain and sunshine. Keith wondered when the last time he’d seen sunshine was.

Tentatively, Lance raised his arms and wrapped them around Keith’s back, holding him closer. Keith’s fingers were clenched in Lance’s shirt, twisting in the material.

“This is better,” Keith muttered. “This is much, much better.”

Keith spent the next week clinging to Lance at any opportunity. Lance warned him not to do it in front of the others. After doing which, he’d said to Keith sternly, “So in the future when you think you want to murder me, remember  _this_ , remember how I saved you from even further embarrassment.”

“Okay,” Keith had muttered, and Lance had winked at him.

“That wasn’t for you,” Lance just said. “That was for future Keith. Return of the memories Keith.”

“Right.”

Still, the difference just touching Lance made in the discomfort Keith felt otherwise was monumental. He couldn’t believe that normally he just made himself suffer through it, locking himself in his room and probably curling up into as tight of a ball as he could manage. It felt so good that even afterwards, after he stopped feeling like he might die unless he was hugging Lance to him, he continued sleeping in his bed.

Lance didn’t even question it. He was just that nice, that genuine, that he would let his amnesiac friend crawl into his bed night after night. They would wake up cuddling, and Keith didn’t even have the grace to feel embarrassed or sheepish. After all, he was just cuddling with a cute boy he’d recently met.  _He_  didn’t have any history with Lance, even though his memory-ridden self might.

“Are you sure we hate each other?” Keith asked Lance one night. They were laying side by side. Keith hadn’t slept in his own bed for a little over a week, and the entire team was growing anxious for him to get his memories back. They were even considering trying to reteach him all the drills and bonding exercises they knew, preparing for the worst. Keith was pretty sure it scared everyone else more than him, his memory being missing. Yes, he wanted it back, yes, he wanted to know what the missing part of his life had been like, but it was everyone else who was missing their friend, not him. He was just now making them.

“Not hate, per se,” Lance said. “We just like to argue.”

“Hmm.”

“You realize everything I say to you has the potential to embarrass me later?” Lance ventured. “You’ll call me a softy when you get your memories back.”

“ _If_  I get my memories back.”

“Don’t say that,” Lance said, looking at him hurriedly.

“Sorry. And I won’t think you’re a softy.”

“You will.”

“Nah. I might say it, but… I won’t  _mean_  it. I’ll probably think it was sweet of you, being so nice to me while my memories were missing.”

“And then you’ll kill me—for being so nice to you while your memories were missing.”

Keith couldn’t help that he didn’t really believe Lance. And he couldn’t help wondering how they were even fighting all the time in the first place. After all, so far he’d managed to decipher only that Lance was incredibly sweet and caring, as well as attractive and conveniently available. Apparently it was general knowledge on the castle-ship that Lance was bi.

“Lance,” Keith said quietly. “Can I… do something? And can you promise you won’t kill me for it?”

“No promises,” Lance said immediately. “Like, if you start strangling me, my awesome reflexes are just going to start happening. It won’t be my fault if you end up karate chopped across the room.”

“Okay,” Keith said, because that was good enough. He wasn’t planning on choking Lance anyway.

Before he could lose nerve, Keith rolled over, practically on top of Lance, and kissed him. For a moment, Lance was completely still, and Keith wondered if he really  _was_  about to get Karate chopped across the room—but then he was kissing him back. His lips were moving softly, sweetly against Keith’s, his hands coming up to hold his hips. His fingers were long and hot and strong, gripping Keith so securely. Keith’s hand was clenched in the sheets by Lance’s head.

And then Lance was shoving him away, both of them breathing heavily, and Keith’s face was way too hot. He’d overstepped a boundary, hadn’t he? He didn’t even know Lance, not in the way that he knew Keith.

“I’m sorry,” Keith breathed.

“You should be,” Lance muttered. “It’s your fault you’re going to murder me one day. Holding your scary Galra-sword and everything. You’ll probably scoop out my eyes first!”

“I won’t!”

“I have no objection to kissing,” Lance said loftily. “And I have no objection to you having a crush on me—it’s a great feeling, you know?” Keith was blushing now, not that Lance could see it very well in the dark. “But you definitely can’t do that until you have your memories again.”

“Okay,” Keith muttered. Now he  _really_  wanted his memories back. “That was my first kiss, you know. Erm… that I know of.”

“You’re killing me,” Lance groaned, rolling over and shoving his face into the pillow. His voice was muffled when he kept speaking. “All the embarrassing things you’re telling me are just killing Future Lance.”

“Sorry,” Keith said again. He didn’t really mean it.

—

It soon became time to activate the plan Pidge had apparently been creating all this time.

“Operation: Force Keith’s Memories to Return One Way of the Other,” she called it. This name scared him, mostly because it sounded like it could possibly be painful. Also, he felt like he had reason to not completely trust all of Pidge’s plans, though maybe that was just instinct.

It started with sensory recreation. Pidge wanted to force him through familiar motions, force him to feel things he’d felt before, to see if that would remind his brain of what he’d forgotten and make him remember. This led to him fighting against robot droids, which he was surprisingly good at, eating weird space-goo (something he’d only seen Hunk eat in the time he’d been here), and leading Lance through an invisible electric maze, which Lance was horrible at and blamed Keith for while running into the walls.

When this didn’t immediately work, Pidge went for plan number two: bonding with his lion.

“I’ve already seen Red,” he admitted. “I slept in her that first night.”

“But have you flown her?”

This resulted in Keith flying around the castle for a little while, which although it was fun, and  _fast_ , it did nothing to revive his missing memories.

“Maybe it’s because he’s not getting shot at,” Lance suggested, before apparently hitting some switch which had the castle shooting at him and making him panic (though this didn’t help his memories either).

No lion-related plan returned his memories, though they tried forming Voltron together and even made Keith use his bayard to make Voltron have a giant sword.

Pidge had more plans, of course, all of which were somehow grueling and energy draining. Even Hunk had a plan.

“We’ve all watched movies, right?” Hunk said in a tone that suggested he was about to suggest a genius idea. “I think the obvious solution is to just hit him over the head again.”

“That  _is_  what always happens on TV,” Lance said consideringly, while both Allura and Coran looked on in horror.

“Earthlings are terrifying,” Coran whispered, too loudly to go unheard.

“They’re going to kill him,” Allura agreed.

“We’re  _not_  hitting Keith over the head!” Shiro said, putting his foot down. Keith was glad, because even Pidge had cocked her head to the side, looking as though she thought this plan might work.

They all went to bed disappointed, having gotten their hopes up too high, thinking he’d have his memories back by the end of the day.

—

Keith woke feeling groggy. His head felt fuzzy and his eyelids heavy. Before he knew it, his heart was pounding, banging away in his chest at rapid speed.

 _Red_ , he thought.  _Where’s Red? We were falling, crashing, and then—_

The memories came back to him like a rubber band snapping into place. He remembered stumbling out of the pod, remembered feeling so utterly lost and confused. He remembered meeting everyone as if for the first time, and looking back on it now felt so  _strange_ , but he was just glad he remembered. How could he have forgotten Voltron in the first place? It seemed bizarre, that something so prominent in his life could’ve so easily slipped from his mind. Being part of Voltron was his  _life_  now, it was all he was good for.

And then, worse, he remembered even more, and his stomach lurched. He was such a fucking idiot! What had he been doing, going around spilling his secrets like they weren’t secret for a  _reason_. He hadn’t even realized that the rest of the team had noticed he became withdrawn and secluded himself on a monthly basis—he hadn’t realized it was that obvious. And the fact that they called it his man-period! What was wrong with them!?

But seriously, he loses his memory for like two seconds and suddenly he can’t deal with problems that are most certainly his own anymore? He had to go crawling to… to  _Lance_  about his weird, Galra instinctual shit?

It’d been so embarrassing the first time it’d happened. He couldn’t even figure out what was wrong with him, why he longed to press himself against Pidge when she came to his door one morning, telling him the team was going to practice together and would he like to join? He’d managed to utter out a semblance of an agreement, the whole time his body shaking just a little. He’d thought something was horribly wrong with him—after all, he  _was_  gay, and though Pidge may look a bit boyish, she certainly  _wasn’t_. To his dismay it’d only gotten worse over the course of the week, and he’d considered the fact that maybe possibly he was dying. He’d taken to avoiding the team, gasping alone in his room and wondering  _why, why, why_  he just wanted to hug someone, to crawl under the sheets with them, when normally he flinched away from anything more affectionate than a fist bump.

When it had ended, he’d only allowed himself to believe that it might’ve been a fluke, might’ve been a space-born sickness, for a few blissful days. Because though he wasn’t Pidge or Hunk, though he wasn’t scarily smart, he also wasn’t dumb enough to think that what had happened to him might not have happened for a reason. And he knew it was true the very next month.

He’d considered the fact that maybe it was a Galra-type puberty. It didn’t seem fair that he had to go through it twice, first as a human, and then again as an alien. But he figured it also might’ve just had something to do with being in space, with being away from the atmosphere he was used to. Maybe living in the same environment as the Galra, or being near them so often, fighting them or working with the Blade of Marmora, had caused his instincts to kick start into whatever the fuck this was.

So every month he suffered. Every month he hid in his room, or trained so hard he passed out from exhaustion, or fought in Voltron with the team, the whole time wondering if someone would hug him in excitement after the battle. Because if they won—a great, exciting win, one fit for giving hugs after—it wouldn’t really be up to him whether or not he got hugged, would it? Sometimes Hunk just did that when he was too excited. Sometimes Lance would sling his arm around Keith’s shoulders, a few pointers in mind since Keith was a drop out and had maybe forgot about this Cool Pilot Fact that Lance knew. And when these moments happened during his… time of the month… he relished in them. He relished in the warm touch of Lance’s arm around his shoulders, behind his neck, in the feel of Hunk’s body close to his own, or Pidge’s small hands gripping his sleeve to show him some cool new thing she’d invented. But he still had to act like himself, still had too pull away after much too soon, which was about as horrible as it sounded.

And he’d spent all those months suffering, locking himself away, saving himself from embarrassment, only to go and get amnesia and decide he had to  _cuddle with Lance for a week straight._

Keith, feeling like he might throw up in his own bed (which, let’s face it, could maybe be a good thing at this point because he could drown in it and die which would obviously be a relief from all the pain he was going through) realized that this wasn’t the worst of it. He’d not only cuddled with Lance, not only clung to him at every given opportunity, he’d also told him he was  _gay_.

WHY DID HE DO THAT?

What kind of stupid did he have to be to just  _do_  that? Clearly he could see where the embarrassment in that might lie? He was a personal guy, he liked to keep shit like that to himself, not that he had  _realized_  that when he was still living with his dad and hadn’t even really talked to someone his own age! And he’d just gone and told Lance! Like it was no big deal!

Right, two of his biggest secrets just out in the open, shoved right under Lance’s nose, probably the one person on the ship he would like for them to be revealed to least. And even worse, he hadn’t just told him these things, he’d  _kissed_  him. It was now apparent that Keith had been an idiot up until two years ago, if he was willing to kiss a person when he had amnesia and didn’t even know the whole of it. Embarrassed—mortified, really—Keith shifted over, wrapping his arms tightly around a pillow and groaned. He was going to have to eject himself into space.

“You okay?”

He was going to have to eject himself into space  _right now_.

Had he seriously fallen asleep in Lance’s bed last night?! Why was he just remembering this now!? After remembering everything  _else_?!

Obviously, the only action he could possibly take in this situation was to run away. And so he did. Keith struggled out of Lance’s sheets—there really were far too many—and tripped onto the carpet, making a b-line for the door.

“Where are you going?” Lance demanded.

“Space!” Keith shouted, and then he was running through the castle halls, wearing one sock, pajama pants, and no shirt.

“Keith!” Lance shouted from behind him, but Keith wasn’t listening. He was running through the castle, through blessedly familiar hallways—he would stop and kiss the floor if he weren’t currently escaping from his embarrassment—and into the control room.

“Hey Keith!” greeted Pidge. She was sitting on one of the control panels, which Allura was standing next to. “Whatchya doin’?”

There was no time to respond.

“Keeeeith! Wait up!” Lance yelled from behind him. Letting out an estranged yell, Keith sprinted to the panel that led to the red lion.

“Stop following me!” he shouted, grabbing onto the handles when the doors flew open.

“Oh!” Allura said from somewhere behind him. “I think he’s got his memories back.”

Keith was zooming down the slanted shaft, hopefully escaping from Lance—

“Not so fast!”

Keith groaned. Was Lance sliding down the shaft like a  _slide_? One glance proved that yes, he was sliding down the shaft like a slide, and Keith debated trying to kick out at his head. Maybe then Lance would lose his own memories and tell Keith some of his most embarrassing secrets.

In the end, Keith had just jumped into Red’s open mouth and urged her to  _go, go, go!_  when Lance catapulted in behind him. This resulted in the two of them tumbling into the pilot’s seat together, Keith sitting haphazardly on top of it and Lance flung out across his lap, only managing to stay upright because Keith was holding onto him.

“Caught you!” Lance cheered.

Keith let go of Lance. He fell to the floor in the heap.

Red, who apparently had no problem whatsoever with this intruder, shot out into space, flying around lazily with both Keith and Lance in her interior.

“Traitor,” Keith muttered, and Red purred a rumbly sort of laugh.

“We need to talk,” Lance said importantly, standing up with his hands on his hips.

“You need to sit down,” Keith said instead. “I can’t fly when I can’t see.”

“Red’s flying by herself,” Lance scoffed. “Have you forgotten how bad of a liar you are too?”

“I am not!”

“There you go, lying again,” Lance sighed. “I fear you’re changed for good.”

“Shut up!”

“Seriously—are we not gonna talk about—”

“No!” Keith spat. “Never!” and after a pause: “Ever!”

“Keith—”

“If you don’t stop talking to me I’m going to make Red eject you out into space,” he threatened. “Is that what you want? ‘Cause I’ll do it.”

“No you won’t.”

“Wha—?”

“Cause you like me.”

Keith felt his entire face go brick red. Yes, he’d kissed Lance but—! He’d been… indisposed! He hadn’t been thinking straight. He didn’t  _really_  like Lance! Sure, he’d always thought he was attractive, and  _sure_ , he was hilarious and a genuinely sweet guy, but he was also  _Lance_ , and he was annoying and they hated each other! Keith didn’t like him!

“That wasn’t me!” Keith spluttered. “That was—that was—amnesia!” It was the only thing he could think to say. “I didn’t know who you were!”

“You were the same person, though,” Lance said idly. “And if  _that_  Keith likes me…”

“Shut up!” Keith said.

“Make me.” Lance winked, and he walked closer to Keith, smirking.

“What’re you—”

“Shut up,” Lance whispered, and he was kissing Keith, and it was just as good as the first time—better, even. It was his second kiss, because he’d been right the other day, he really hadn’t ever kissed anyone before. And Lance was  _good_  at this. His lips moved expertly against Keith’s, his hands buried in Keith’s hair, tilting his head up, opening his mouth with his tongue. And jesus fuck, his  _tongue_. It was… it was illegal, to say the least. The way he was using it was like it was a weapon—it was rendering Keith weak and useless, anyway. If he were standing he certainly would’ve fallen by now.

Luckily, though, he was sitting, and so Lance invited himself onto Keith’s lap, both of his hands still tilting Keith’s head up, his tongue still plundering his mouth, his teeth occasionally nipping his lips, making him gasp and groan, making his breath hitch in his throat.

And then—laughter. It didn’t make sense. Neither of them were laughing, they were both way too occupied with kissing, but the laughter was definitely happening. It was distinct.

Apparently Lance noticed it too, because he pulled way (cheeks pink, lips red, hair a mess—when had Keith messed that up?) and frowned.

“What?” he croaked.

Keith’s eyes widened, seeing the screen behind Lance, on which all of their traitor friend’s faces grinned at them.

“Aagh!” Keith exclaimed, pointing at it. Without anything better to say, and certainly without a more intelligent way to express himself, he repeated this. “AAGGGH!!!”

Lance was just as embarrassed as he was, and they both scrambled, tripping and tumbling over each other in their haste to knock the holographic screen away, both cursing each other and their friends in the process.

By the time they managed to end their idiot friends’ incessant laughter, they were panting and embarrassed and laying in a heap in Red’s hull.

“This sucks,” Keith muttered.

“Nah,” Lance said. He was smiling. And his cheeks were still flushed, and when he looked over at Keith, he somehow managed to look even happier. “Not really.”

“Shut up!” Keith managed, the look on Lance’s face making him feel even more embarrassed.

“Okay,” Lance said, but he rolled on top of Keith for another kiss. Red purred all around them, and it was just like they were getting laughed at all over again, but for some reason Keith couldn’t find it in himself to mind.


End file.
